"If you look deep into the shadows to the right, you can just see Rod Serling…"
--a friend of mine, upon seeing the photo.
The first year that I started what would be my career for the next thirty, I subleted a room in a bland brick townhouse. Two names were on the lease, guys in their early 30s who'd just started their own business. It was not the best time in my life, nor was that townhouse, nested near a stretch of chain restaurants and strip mall sorts of businesses, where I wanted to be.
I will call the accounting & sales half of the new enterprise, Bernie I.
I moved out a year later and rented space in a house in a quaint neighbourhood called Wortley Village. The live-in owner, a man my age, was also named Bernie. Bernie II. A third renter came along, a recently-graduated engineer. We shared a Y-shaped driveway with a young couple, a man I knew a little from university, and his wife, who shares her name with a celebrated author. They had an affectionate white dog which they'd rescued from a dumpster. We were, to paraphrase another noder, like the wacky neighbours in a 90s sitcom. What followed over the next few years might make a half-decent second-half of a bildungsromans. In some respects, my settled adult life began there.
But I never kept up with those two guys from the townhouse and rarely even thought of the year I spent there. I knew that their business only lasted a few years, that one moved back to Toronto and Bernie I remained local. I last saw him perhaps a year after I moved, and never encountered him again.
The two Bernies did not know each other.
Bernie II eventually moved to the US, married, and now lives in California.
Bernie I came unexpectedly to mind last night, so I searched him online. I learned that he died several years ago, in his early 60s. The web vouchsafed the usual public details of his life. No cause of death was expressly given, but the memorial page asked for donations to the Heart & Stroke Foundation.
At the online memorial, I found the expected regrets and regards, the thoughts and prayers expressed to the family by various people who'd known him. One person (also, coincidentally, named Bernie. Bernie III, I suppose) posted the sole photograph of Bernie I's gleaming smile, "from 25 years ago" at an unidentified crowded social event.
In the murky background, but near a light source and clearly visible, stands Bernie II.